Anita Desai was born in 1935 in Delhi to a German mother and a
Bengali father. She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali,
Urdu, Hindi and English at school and in the city streets. She has
said that she grew up surrounded by Western literature and music, not
realizing until she was older that this was an anomaly in her world
where she also learned the Eastern culture and customs. She married a
businessman at twenty-one and raised several children before becoming
known for her writing. Her first book, Cry,thePeacock
was published in England in 1963, and her better known novels include
In Custody (1984) and Baumgartner's Bombay (1988). She
once wrote: "I see India through my mother's eyes, as an outsider,
but my feelings for India are my father's, of someone born here"
(Griffiths).

She never considered trying to first publish in India because
there was no publisher in India who would be interested in fiction by
an Indian writer (Jussawalla) and it was first in England that her
work became noticed. U.S. readers were slower to discover her, due,
she believes to England's natural interest in India and the U.S.'s
lack of comprehension regarding the foreignness of her subject.

But Desai only writes in English. This, she has repeatedly
said,was a natural and unconscious choice for her: "I can state
definitely that I did not choose English in a deliberate and
conscious act and I'd say perhaps it was the language that chose me
and I started writing stories in English at the age of seven, and
have been doing so for thirty years now without stopping to think why
"(Desai).

She is considered the writer who introduced the psychological
novel in the tradition of Virginia Woolf to India. Included in this,
is her pioneer status of writing of feminist issues. While many
people today would not classify her work as feminist, she believes
this is due to changing times: "The feminist movement in India is
very new and a younger generation of readers in India tends to be
rather impatient of my books and to think of them as books about
completely helpless women, hopeless women. They find it somewhat
unreal that the women don't fight back, but they don't seem to
realize how very new this movement is" (Jussawalla).

Also, she says, her writing is realistic: "Women think I am doing
a disservice to the feminist movement by writing about women who have
no control over their lives. But I was trying, as every writer tries
to do, even in fiction, to get at the truth, write the truth. It
would have been really fanciful if I had made [for example, in
Clear Light of Day] Bim and Tara modern-day feminists "(in
Griffiths).

Desai considers Clear Light of Day, her most
autobiographical book, because she was writing about her neighborhood
in Delhi, although the characters are not based on her brothers and
sisters. What she was exploring in this novel, she has said, was the
importance of childhood and memories as the source of a life. She had
wanted to start the book at the end and move backwards, into the
characters' childhood and further, into the childhood of their
parents etc., but in the end: "When I had gone as far back as their
infancy the book just ground to a halt; it lost its momentum. It told
me that this was done, that I couldn't carry it further. But I still
have a sense of disappointment about that book, because the intention
had been different" (Jussawalla). The character of Raja is identified
with her in the sense that he is so immersed in all different types
of literature and culture, and is so concerned with protecting the
multicultural heritage of India. His worries about the Muslim
neighbor family is not just about them particularly, but rather worry
about the loss of all that the Muslim culture and literature
contributes to India.

While Desai has taught for years at Mount Holyoke and MIT, and
spends most of the year outside of India, she does not consider
herself part of the Indian Diaspora. Although she does not fit in the
Indian box anymore (Griffiths) as she said, she considers herself
lucky for having not left India until late in her life, because she
feels that she has been drifting away from it ever since: "I can't
really write of it with the same intensity and familiarity that I
once had." Yet she cannot feel at home in any other place or society
(Griffiths).